What are the relics of our future? For this issue, we set out to ignite the first sparks of a Neo-Renaissance and build a new future in our own image.
An imaginary neo-city for our community. With our favorite artists, photographers, and writers, we searched for the ruins, relics, icons, and rituals that might shape the heritage of what comes next: our DEMOCARCY. From Marie-Madeleine’s froufrous to collapsing architectures, sacredfashionimages, and emerging AI systems, we aim to break the linearity of history – to reactivate the Renaissance note as a distant event, but as a method. A political, aesthetic, and technological strategy for reclaiming narrative. In this world, ruins are not signs of decay; they are proof that old structures are dissolving and new ones are taking form.
While we wait for our Western system to finally accept its own end, while bombs are falling elsewhere, and cities feel more fragile than ever, what space remains for us to create a new order? To imagine another humankind? As systems and empires burn themselves down, and as we hope to redirect the future from its techno-feudalist drift, we create a temporary space here, in these pages. We store what we want to carry into the new world – an inestimable archive that can guide us through what comes next. Towards something completely new.